22/03/26
I went to my first ever Chinese medicine appointment yesterday, and as I lay on the table - acupuncture needles placed in the tops of my feet, up my legs, and in a ring in my stomach - I couldn’t help but feel a little like I was wasting my time. And that thought caught me by quite by surprise.
I’m famously a Western Medicine sceptic… not in the anti-vaxx way of course - just in the way that I understand how we arrive at what we know as medicine. It doesn’t take long to figure out that when you realise what counts as ‘evidence’ for many clinical interventions in Western Medicine, evidence based care is not really evidence based at all for many female and BIPOC bodies (let alone for our trans and nb friends, and those who inhabit multiple categories). If you are not familiar, I implore you to investigate, it’s a real rabbit hole. I could write a whole thesis on this shit - oh wait, I did…
Traditional medicines (specifically ‘eastern’ ones) historically seem to inhabit a precarious super-position in the Western imagination. On one hand, it’s quack shit. It doesn’t live within the enlightened promise of the scientific method, and hell be to anyone who deposes the all glorious, omnipotent power of cold hard numerical ‘proof’. On the other, TMs are an in-vogue way for whites to ‘decolonise’ their wellness and champion their ever important understanding of the world of alternative and holistic mechanisms of health and self-care (I love when white people use ‘decolonise’ as a verb for accepting any ideas from groups they see as racialised… like girl I can smell the infographic on you.) The gentrification of Chinese wellness is a subject I have a lot of thoughts on, but I’ll save them for another time.
I am talking in extremes of course (as I often do). More and more, the (long known might I add) benefits of traditional medicines are increasingly valued and respected in the foreground of a uniting medicine, one that sees many tactics as complementary in promoting health for bodies whom western medicine alone was never designed for.
Ashamedly, I think despite my best work, all the years of subconscious programming hit me hard on that table - specifically, I let the ‘quack-shit’ propaganda win. Although I knew in my heart that Chinese medicine has been tried and tested for thousands of years on Chinese bodies just like mine, and that I believe staunchly in care beyond a western paradigm, my brain was telling my heart to shut the fuck up. Before my training as a professional medico-sceptic/reformist I of course trained formally as a biochemical scientist - I’m a woman of proof, and I think there is little I can do to change that. What my training in the former has done however, is shown me that proof comes in many ways.
What I know is that my family has been going to Chinese doctors forever, that my A-mah can walk as if she has never had any pain after an acupuncture session. I know that coming off that table I felt focused and calm, that the first thing I did when I got home wasn’t lay down in bed in pain and exhaustion, but move my body and cook a meal. I know that I spent a fuckload of money on those needles, but I’ve spent just as much at Western doctors who tell me they can’t help until I spend a fuckload more on tests and pills and follow-ups. I know that I am going back to that clinic, and getting it done all over again.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding.
Love, Lara xxx